Karl Barth encouraged preachers to approach sermons with the Bible in one hand and the newspapers in the other. But I have to tell you, I am finding that suggestion increasingly difficult these days. Not so much for the divisiveness, although, oh man, the divisiveness. Some days it feels like the color of the sky is up for debate. But the real struggle for me is the sheer volume of news. Mass shootings in Texas and Las Vegas, genocide in Myanmar, the uncovering of an epidemic of sexual harassment, Korea, Iran, the Paris Climate Agreement. To pick any one topic is to neglect a dozen others. So I want to dig into Amos this morning. Because, as I will share with you, the time of Amos too was a period of human history that felt dark and overwhelming.
Let’s first take some time and put Amos in his correct historical context. And here I’m going to have to apologize, because I tend to geek out on this stuff. So bear with me if we go a bit into the historical weeds here. But a) I think it’s important that we know the time in which Amos was writing in order to understand his message, and b) I think history is just super fascinating and I get carried away when I get excited.
The beginning of Amos dates itself to the reigns of King Uzziah of Judah and King Jeroboam of Israel, which would place it around 760 to 750 BCE. This was a period of relative peace for Israel. Israel had long been threatened by the growing Assyrian empire. But in the early eighth century, internal struggles turned Assyria’s attention away from conquest and left Israel and its neighbors more or less alone. Free from the Assyrian threat, Israel prospered. Archeological evidence confirms the scriptural description, the religious and political elites of Israel lived in wealth and luxury. Based on the theology prevalent at the time, that God’s favor was demonstrated by prestige and military power, it seemed like God was indeed favoring the people of Israel and not the conflict plagued Assyrians.
All of this changed very suddenly in 745 BCE, when the Tiglath-pileser the Third usurped the Assyrian throne. By 722, the luxurious capital of Israel’s northern kingdom was in ruin and the kingdom itself was a province of Assyria.
But before Tiglath-pileser came Amos. And Amos brought strong words of judgment into Israel’s wealth and prosperity. This is from chapter two: “Thus says the Lord,” said Amos. “For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment… because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way… and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed.” Israel’s sin was building its prosperity on the backs of the least of God’s people, the needy, the poor, and the afflicted. The covenant God made with Israel had two aspects, love of God and love of neighbor, and so much had Israel failed at this second aspect, that no amount of the first would save them. In the section we read this morning, God railed against the Israelites shallow worship, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies… Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
The message of Amos is clear, the guilt of Israel was driven by their own selfish desires. The luxury and wealth of the elite was gained at the expense of the poor and needy. It was not peace and prosperity gifted from God that the elite were experiencing, but peace and prosperity gained from the oppression of others of God’s family. Even their worship was selfish, meant not to lift up God and build the community of God’s people, but to make themselves feel good about their faithfulness. And if we’re honest with ourselves, while maybe not to the degree of the northern kingdom, we too are guilty of such selfishness. Our confession all fall has referenced it, “we confess that we turn the church inward rather than moving it outward.” We don’t always “speak for what is right and act for what is just.” Amos’ harsh words to Israel should feel challenging, because they could also convict us.
But believe it or not, this harsh condemnation is one of the reasons I love and find such deep and powerful hope in the prophets. Because here’s the thing about Amos. These words were written twenty-eight hundred years ago. Twenty-eight hundred years ago, Amos came to proclaim God’s judgment, and the fact that we are reading this judgment today is a testament to God’s love. Because what Amos threatened would happen, happened. In all of human history there have been few times as dark and dangerous as living in the northern kingdom of Israel during the rise of Tigleth-pileser the third. Israel was destroyed, completely and totally demolished and desolated. And we are still here. The book of Amos is the first glimmer of the promise of resurrection. That no matter how dark and broken and scary things get, no matter how much it looks like the end, the promise of God’s covenant is that the end is never the end, because resurrection always follows death. And we don’t even have to wait twenty-eight hundred years to see that. Amos was one of the earliest of the prophets. Even before the time of Jesus, this whole destruction and redemption thing happened a bunch more times. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hezekiah, all of these prophets brought the same harsh message and the same promised redemption. Again and again and again in the Bible we read this message of the people of God wandering away, and God firmly refusing to give up on them, to give up on us. That the harsh condemnation of Amos is the first of the prophets, and not the last, is proof of God’s unconditional, unwavering, deep, and powerful love for us. God hasn’t given up on God’s people in twenty-eight hundred years, so I have a hard time believing that God is giving up on us now.
The other powerful message of hope I find in the prophets is that God loves us enough to speak hard words to us. I don’t know about you, but I really hate conflict. I hate feeling like people are angry at me, like I have hurt someone. I am probably conflict-avoidant to a fault. And it has hurt my relationships. When faced with conflict, I would much rather walk away from the person than address my hurt and ask for forgiveness. What the prophets show us is that God loves us too much to avoid conflict with us. God did not ghost the people of Israel until they went away. God walked right into the middle of the muck and the mire and called them out on their complacency and self-absorption. The prophets’ harshness show us what real love looks like. Love is not soft and cushy and everything goes. Love can be confrontational and hard and painful. But it is from love like that, love deep enough to call us out on our failings, to speak truth to us even when it hurts, and love us through our anger, that real relationship is born. That is the kind of love God has for us.
Brothers and sisters, the hope and the promise in the prophets is that God loves us so powerfully, so deeply, and so fully, that nothing, not the powers of this world, not the attacks of our enemies, not even our own sin and failings are enough to keep God away from us. So firm, so fierce is God’s love that God will wade into the fire of conflict and anger to refine us into God’s people, that God will go to death and beyond to bring us to resurrection. This is a powerful, powerful message of hope and love and commitment in the middle of a world that feels so full of fear and death. For twenty-eight hundred years this has been God’s promise to us, and I am not so arrogant as to think that a message with such resounding historical truth could be ending today.
So that is the good news. Here is the challenge. Amos was a reluctant prophet. He was not even a professional prophet. He was a sheepherder from the southern kingdom of Judah who was called, against his will, to bring this hard and painful message to Israel. The challenge is that sometimes God calls us to be prophets. Sometimes God calls us to wade into places of conflict and pain and to speak hard words of truth of the need to care for the poor, the needy, and the afflicted. The times in which Amos spoke were not all that different from our own times, and we may be the ones God is calling to remind God’s people of God’s covenant. A covenant God set not just between us and God, but also between us and our neighbor. God’s love for us is cruciform, it is cross-shaped. It is not only lived out in this up-down relationship between us and God, but also in this side to side relationship between us and our neighbor. And friends, let me be the first to tell you, that speaking truth in love in this world is hard. It will cause conflict and it will cause division. And so again, I find hope in Amos. Because twenty-eight hundred years ago, when Tiglath-pileser the Third took the throne in Assyria and the kingdom of Israel fell, I bet Amos felt like he failed. He came with this word of warning, and the people of Israel did not hear it, and Israel was destroyed. But, here we are, twenty-eight hundred years later, and the words of Amos still ring true. The words of Amos still bring hope and challenge and promise. The words of Amos still matter and still bring justice and peace, and still lift up God’s care for the poor, the needy, and the afflicted. What the book of Amos tells us is that we do not always get to see the results of our labors. We are, as Bishop Oscar Romero famously said, “prophets of a future not our own.” God’s timing is not always like our timing. We may never get to know the effects of our actions. But our work matters, we matter, the love and the care and the challenge and the hope that we bring to this world in the name of God makes a difference. So keep on, dear sisters and brothers. Keep on in hope. Yes, it is dark right now, but it has been dark before. And let us close with the closing three verses of the book of Amos. “The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God.” Amen.
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